Free King John & Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

supernumeraries were employed. 27 There were fifty-nine persons on stage in the opening scene of the play, as opposed to the six mentioned in the stage directions of the 1623 Folio. 28 Charles Kean’s productions at the Princess’ Theatre in 1852 and 1858 followed suit and upped the bidding in terms of historical accuracy, so that the throne room in Act 1 Scene 1, for example, was an exact replica of the hall inRochester Castle; Kean also made use of large numbers of supernumeraries and used Macready’s promptbook to inform his stage directions. 29
    By the time of Tree’s 1899 production, however, tastes were beginning to shift again, and may have been given a helping hand by Tree’s excessive archaeological-spectacular extravaganza. In an effort to outdo the previous spectacular productions of Kemble, Macready, Phelps, and Kean, Tree included highly researched costumes designed by Percy Anderson, sumptuous sets, vast numbers of supernumeraries, and not only a Magna Carta tableau introduced by Kean but also a further
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tableaux (with a resulting significant cut in the text). The walls of Angiers were complete with massive Norman archways, a moat, battlements, crenellated parapet walls, corbels, and, in the distance, a faithful painted representation of the medieval chateau of Angiers. 30 Tree’s production was distrustful of the text, reliant on props rather than acting conviction, and sentimental. As such, it contradicted virtually all of the precepts of modern theater as they were emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century: overemphasis of archaeological realism was increasingly coming to be seen as artifice and the spectacular as form without content.
    Other theatrical trends were also afoot in the early twentieth century which prejudiced against the continuation of the spectacular, most noticeably the rise of the repertory system. 31 Since the basis of the repertory system was a move away from “commercial drama” toward a smaller, more experimental mode of theatrical production, there was no place at all for the high Victorian mode of the spectacular.
King John
’s episodic nature was now a theatrical handicap as the focus of attention shifted from exterior picture show to a more restrained and austere style. Freed from the shackles of historical realism and the distractions of the spectacular, the English theater of the early twentieth century moved toward a greater concentration on the inner coherence of the play and of its characterization.
    Absence of any reference to the two things a modern spectator can be guaranteed to know about King John: his legendary relationship with Robin Hood and his signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 seem like glaring dramatic omissions today. Shakespeare died twelve years before the 1628 Petition of Right and over sixty years before the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, each of which looks directly back to clause 39 of the charter of 1215. 32 Most importantly, however, Shakespeare could not have known that, within thirty years of his death, England would be plunged into a bloody civil war that was effectively a dispute over the significance of the document, or that the sentiments and even the language of Magna Carta would be used in framing the state and national constitutions of the United States a century and a half later. Palmer sums it up pithily: “As for Magna Carta, the Elizabethans had never heard of it.” 33 It is noteworthy that both Kean and Tree should have felt the need to insert the signing of Magna Carta into their nineteenth-century productions in the form of tableaux, although the decline in taste for the dramatic spectacular and the general upward trend in respect for the original text during the twentieth century have not allowed this expedient solution. It seems likely that the lack of reference to Magna Carta has contributed to the play’s decline in popularity.

    2. 1899, Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production, with Tree himself as John. Tree